‘Extra hour’s parking would be just the ticket’
THERE were fresh calls this week for an extension to Dromore town centre’s one-hour parking restriction, with public resentment still simmering more than a year after The Leader first flagged up frustration over fines.
As the so-called redcoats strolled into Market Square last Tuesday morning they left in their wake lowered brows and muttered complaints among passersby, some traders included.
“Can we not get rid of these traffic wardens?” asked one man, as a driver swung into a parking space, only to swing straight back out after visibly taking note of the redcoat emerging from behind a parked van.
“They’re killing this place,” said one disgruntled trader, not for the first time. “They were here at 5 o’clock last night and I thought ‘they’re late landing in today’.
“They did somebody up Princes Street and there wasn’t another car in sight.
“Then they’re here first thing this morning again, and look around you - there’s barely a car parked in the Square.”
Meanwhile, Ulster Unionist Councillor Olive Mercer is among the latest to petition the Department of Regional Development for a one-hour extension to the existing parking restriction.
“I’ve asked for a two-hour limit instead of the one-hour limit,” she said. “I know the traffic wardens are only doing their job, but sometimes it’s just about having a wee bit of common sense.
“For someone going to the hairdresser say, an hour just isn’t long enough, and most of the people who would be coming in to eat aren’t workers nipping in an out on their lunch hour; they’re coming in to have lunch with friends and they just can’t relax when they’re clock-watching to make sure they don’t get back to their car a bit late and find a ticket.”
A Dromore Chamber of Commerce appeal for a new time limit was rejected within the last two years and calls for an extended, two-hour, restriction last went out as recently as September.
It was then that one Princes Street trader successfully appealed after being ticketed for an 11-minute over-stay while ferrying tools from his car as he worked at his pizzeria, Zucca.
Richard Clements had the ticket quashed at tribunal on the sole grounds of loading/unloading, but he swiftly called for an extension of the one-hour waiting time and the exercise of more discretion by those tasked with enforcing the parking regulations.
He said at the time, “It’s wrecking the town and that’s an opinion widely shared throughout the town; put someone in a red coat in town and it empties to Sprucefield or wherever.”
Pior to that, in January last year, reports of unrest over parking enforcement saw Councillor Paul Rankin call for more parking spaces in town as well as common sense and discretion from ‘traffic wardens’, in line, he said, with the spirit of the law.
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Weather for Dromore
Thursday 24 May 2012
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Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: South
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